O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 eBook

Whistling, he entered the office, stirred up the fire,
and crossed to the cook-house. It was empty.
The charcoal fire was out. Shivering, he rebuilt
it, looked through the larder, and hacked off a ragged
slice of jerked venison. A film of fear rose
in his soul. What if they were really
gone? What if Antoine had taken her?
It looked like it. His heart sank. Not to
see her again! Not to feel her strange, thrilling
presence! Not to sense that indomitable, insolent
soul, throwing its challenge before it as it walked
through the world!

Crossman came out, returned to the office, busied
himself in tidying the living room and solving the
disorder of his desk. The twilight sifted over
wood and hill, crept from under the forest arches,
and spread across the snow of the open. He lit
the lamps and waited. The silence was complete.
It seemed as if the night had come and closed the
world, locking it away out of the reach even of God.

The meal Crossman had bunglingly prepared lay untouched
on the table. Now and then the crash of an avalanche
of snow from the overburdened branches emphasized
the stillness. Dreading he knew not what, Crossman
waited—­and loneliness is not good for a
sick soul.

Thoughts began crowding, nudging one another; happenings
that he had dismissed as casual took on new and sinister
meanings. “Two and two together”
became at once a huge sum, leaping to terrifying conclusions.
Then with the silence and the tense nerve-draw of waiting
came the sense of things finished—­done forever.
A vast, all-embracing finality—­“Neant”—­the
habitant expression for the uttermost nothing, the
word seemed to push at his lips. He wanted to
say it, but a premonition warned him that to utter
it was to make it real.

Should he call upon the name of the Void, the Void
would answer. He feared it—­it meant
that She would be swallowed also in the great gaping
hollow of nothingness. He strained his ears for
sounds of the living world—­the spit of
the fire, the fall of clinkers in the grate, the whisper
of the wind stirring at the door. He tried to
analyse his growing uneasiness. He was sure now
that she had followed Antoine’s bidding—­forgetting
him, if, indeed, her desires had ever reached toward
him.

Now she seemed the only thing that mattered.
He must find her; he must follow. Wherever she
was, there only was the world of reality. Where
she was, was life. And to find her, he must find
Antoine—­and then, without warning, the
door gaped—­and Antoine stood before him,
like a coloured figure pasted on the black ground
of the night. Then he entered, quiet and matter-of-fact.
He nodded, closed the door against the biting cold,
pulled off his cap, and stood respectfully.

“It is no use to wait for the Boss; he will
not come,” said the log-brander. “I
came to tell Monsieur, before I go on, that le Cure
is safe at Chaumiere Noire. Yes, he is safe,
and Monsieur Jakapa have turn back, when I catch up
with him and tell him——­”